Do Bat Boxes Work?
A bat box or bat house provides housing for bats. Conservation organizations promote them as a way to help and sustain bat populations, as well as a way to control insect populations. Texas Heritage for Living even went so far as to claim every backyard should have a bat box.
They can also help you keep bats out of your home. You provide the bats with a safe place of their own. However, they aren't a foolproof solution and won't encourage bats to move out of your attic if they're already there.
What to Do Before You Set Up Your Box
We recommend calling us to conduct a home inspection before setting up your bat box. Why? Because if you're going to invite bats to hang around in your yard, you want to make sure you've excluded them from your home.
Remember, bats can fit through holes as narrow as ⅝ of an inch, so you're not necessarily going to spot and caulk all those holes on a casual inspection.
By allowing us to perform some preliminary exclusion, you increase your chances of keeping the bats out of your home even as you're helping them.
Where to Set Up Your Bat House
You can buy commercial bat houses or make your own, but location matters. You can't attach them to trees, for example, because the branches create flight obstacles for the bats and offer bat predators such as owls a nice place to perch and catch them.
You'll want to raise them roughly 15 feet off the ground in an area that gets a lot of sun and has a water source nearby. We recommend securing them to tall poles rather than placing them in the eaves of your building, as you don't want them noticing small holes in your roof and getting bright ideas about other places where they might like to live.
Amazon allows you to purchase a telescoping bat box pole (and bat boxes themselves), as do many other retail stores.
Get Help Today
If bats work their way into your home despite your efforts to provide them with some housing of their own, don't fret. It's important to take care of the problem immediately to prevent damage and disease from bat guano, but you can rest assured that your bat box probably didn't cause the problem. We have so many bats in Houston that it's futile to chase them out of your yard completely.
Contact our team to gently pull those bat families from your attic and then exclude them from further entry so they stay in your yard where they belong.
REQUEST A FREE INSPECTION
Our goal is to take time to evaluate each customers situation and customize proven results to solve it. If you are looking for a professional solution for your Bat Removal needs, please contact us today.
3 Bat Prevention Tips
If there's anything Texas has plenty of, it's bats. They've even become a local tourist attraction.
We love to see them in the night sky, but nobody loves to have them in their home. Here are a few ways to keep bats in nature where they belong.
#1) Enlist Help from a Scare-Owl
Mount a fake, plastic owl as high as possible, somewhere on or near your roof. Bats want to roots in your attic, so making them think a predator is nearby can help.
Here's the catch: they'll eventually ignore a stationary "owl," so you'll have to move it once every season to ensure they stay afraid of it.
#2) Swap Exterior Lights
Bats eat bugs. So if you can attract fewer bugs, you can attract fewer bats, too.
Regular white outdoor bulbs will bring plenty of bugs. Yellow ones attract less.
Don't go with a bug zapper. The blue light draws the bugs in for zapping. That's great for killing yard mosquitoes, but anyone who has ever seen one can tell you they're coated in dead bugs. It's like advertising an all-you-can-eat bat-food buffet.
#3) Keep Egress Holes Plugged
A good half of the work that we do involves finding tiny egress holes and plugging them. Bats only need a hole that's ⅜" in diameter to squeeze through, so this can be a challenge.
You can stay on top of it by plugging any you happen to find yourself. Anybody can miss one, but there's no need to leave one that you've already located.
If you have a chimney, install stainless steel chimney caps with a wire mesh covering. The chimney serves as a sort of bat superhighway straight to your attic. Don't leave it open for them.
If you want to be absolutely sure you're getting them all, you can watch the house at dusk to see if bats are entering or exiting through any point on your home. If you realize you've got bats in your attic, though, it's time to call us.
Have You Already Lost the Bat Battle?
Just call us. The team at Elite Wildlife Services has expertise in finding every nook and cranny that bats use to enter a Texas home and heavy-duty bird netting that keeps them away.
We also know how to get bats out of your home humanely, safely, and in accordance with Texas law.
Why be driven batty when you can call us to schedule an inspection?
REQUEST A FREE INSPECTION
Our goal is to take time to evaluate each customers situation and customize proven results to solve it. If you are looking for a professional solution for your Bat Removal needs, please contact us today.
Bat Removal in The Woodlands
There are ten species of bats inhabiting the Woodlands area:
- The Eastern Red Bat
- The Seminole Bat
- The Hoary Bat
- The Northern Yellow Bat
- The Big Brown Bat
- The Evening Bat
- The Eastern Pipistrelle
- The Silver-Haired Bat
- The Free-tailed Bat
On certain nights in the area you can see hundreds of them taking flight, off to look for food. With so many flitting about it's little wonder that they eventually end up in our homes and businesses.
When they get into buildings they are not harmless. Instead, they cause disease and a great deal of damage to almost any structure they get into. It's important to protect your investments by handling bats the right way.
Here's what you need to know.
Bat Houses Don't Help Prevent Bats
Sorry: you can't keep bats out of your home by building them a more attractive habitat.
Bat houses are certainly a good idea if you want to help threatened bat populations. Bats just can't exercise any discernment that might make them say: oh, that house is for me, so I'll stay out of this person's attic.
Instead, some bats will roost in the bat house and then other bats will arrive. If your home is accessible, some of them will go roost in your attic.
In fact, you should be very careful about putting up a bat house or encouraging bats in any other way if you have not yet taken steps to make your home inaccessible to them.
They Are Gentle and Beneficial When They Stay Outside
You don't want to go the other extreme wherein you start murdering bats with traps and lures and poisons. Bats have a lot going for them.
They eat insects, including mosquitos. They are seed-dispensers and pollinators, which means they're vital to our food-bearing ecosystems. They are gentle little animals and are about as clean as any wild animal ever is.
They're also endangered because a lot of people kill bats thanks to old superstitions that say they're dangerous, aggressive, or evil animals.
We don't want to contribute to their endangerment. We just want to prevent them from doing damage to your home.
Humane Bat Removal Solves the Problem
Here at Elite Wildlife Services, we help the home and business owners in the Woodlands seal off the areas that bats might use to access their homes. We then trap and remove bats safely, putting them somewhere they can do some good while preventing them from doing any more damage.
If you think you might have bats in your home, don't panic, don't reach for poison, and don't waste your money on "bat deterrents" that don't work.
Call us to take them out of your home or office so that you can get back to living a happy, bat-free lifestyle.
REQUEST A FREE INSPECTION
Our goal is to take time to evaluate each customers situation and customize proven results to solve it. If you are looking for a professional solution for your Squirrel Removal needs, please contact us today.
How to Make Your Home Less Attractive to Bats
While the team at Elite Wildlife Services is happy to provide you with humane bat removal services, it's always nice when we can keep them out of your house in the first place. In addition, once you've paid for creature removal the last thing you want to do is see them return.
Here are a few tips for ensuring bats will want to find places other than your attic to build their next home.
Prevent Bats by Blocking Entry Points
The easiest way to prevent a bat problem is to block their access to your home. Bats can use relatively small holes to get into your space.
Start with window screens, chimney caps, and draft guards beneath attic doors. You'll also want to caulk electrical or plumbing holes. Yes, bats don't always get into the attic: sometimes they fly in through an open door or window, too!
Check out this page from Bat Conservation International to see all the surprising entry points that bats can use to get into your house.
Avoid Using Lights to Discourage Bats
Motion lights are a great security measure, as are porch lights and entry lights. We're not discouraging you from using those.
Some people try to shine huge spotlights on their attics to keep bats away though, and this is a bad idea. This is because the lights will just attract more insects. While the light may annoy the bats a little the concentrated food source will more than make up for the inconvenience.
As for the lights you have to have? Swap out white lights for yellow ones. They attract fewer insects, which means even fewer food sources.
Other Repellent Devices
Most repellents simply don't work very well. For example, expensive audio repellents don't always do a good job of keeping bats away. Scent-based repellents are more likely to upset the people who live in the home than the bats.
Fortunately, once you've closed off access to your home you should be safe. There's nothing wrong with having bats near your home as long as you don't have them in it. After all, they'll keep the mosquito population down in your yard, and they don't hurt anything so long as they're staying out of human habitats.
If you do get bats in your home, well, you know who to call. We'll help you get rid of that bat colony, and will take steps to ensure they don't come back ever again.
